Part of the Founder’s Story → · Intensity & Overexcitability
For years, almost every big fight or misunderstanding at work came down to the same feeling:
“Why can’t you see this? It’s so simple!”
I’d sit in a boardroom or stand in the lab, spot a clear flaw in a circuit or a business bottleneck, and solve it in my head in about ten seconds. Then I’d open my mouth and dump the whole answer at the speed my mind was moving.
I expected relief. What I got was blank faces, crossed arms, and people shutting down.
To me, I was handing them a shortcut. To them, I’d turned on a firehose. They felt judged or steamrolled. I’d leave thinking everyone was slow. They’d leave thinking I was arrogant, impatient, and impossible to work with.
I was 47 before I understood what was really going on — when I finally learned about gifted adults.
The room wasn’t slow. I wasn’t broken. We were just running on different clock speeds.
Speech is too slow for the mind
A gifted mind doesn’t think in neat lines. It jumps. Step A connects to Step F, then leaps to Step M, and lands at Z before a more linear thinker has finished Step B.
But speech only works one word at a time — about 130 to 150 words a minute. When your head is moving much faster than that, pushing those ideas through your mouth creates friction:
- You skip the middle. Steps B through Y feel obvious to you, so you jump straight to Z. Everyone else is lost.
- You dump too much. Trying to explain, you pour out details, side notes, and connections until the other person’s working memory is full.
- You sound angry. Speed often comes with intensity — the heat mapped in Intensity & Overexcitability. What feels like passionate problem-solving can sound like an attack to someone who needs time.
When this keeps happening, gifted adults usually do one of two things: they become irritable micromanagers, or they go quiet in meetings — arms folded, checked out — because translating their thoughts feels like too much work.
Loneliness at high speed
That’s why intense thinkers can feel deeply alone even with good friends, family, and a full office around them.
It isn’t about feeling “better than.” It’s about bandwidth.
If every conversation means downshifting into first gear, cutting out most of what you’re thinking, and watching yourself so you don’t make people uncomfortable, talking stops being connection. It becomes a performance. You wear a mask all day — calm, careful, slow — while the engine inside wants to run flat out.
I lived in that exhaustion for decades. It’s why I leaned on voice notes — using my phone like an external hard drive before my own speed wiped the idea, which I wrote about in The Speed of Thought.
But catching thoughts for yourself doesn’t fix how you share them with others. The pacing gap with partners and rooms is the same territory as The Asynchronous Dilemma — your mind arrives early; the room is still catching up.
AI as a translation layer
Over the last two years, many gifted and neurodivergent adults have started using AI in a way software teams didn’t really design for.
They’re not only using it to write code or summarize mail. They’re using it as a decompressor and a buffer.
For the first time, a fast mind can talk to something that can keep up. You can dump a messy, unfiltered 2,000-word stream at 2 a.m., and the model doesn’t get defensive or tired.
More useful: it can bridge your speed and the room’s pace:
- Softening the edge: Take a blunt critique and ask: “Rewrite this for my leadership team so the technical point stays clear without putting people on the defensive.”
- Filling in the middle: Take a leap to Step Z and ask: “What are the step-by-step milestones from A to Z that a project manager will need to see to trust this?”
- Asking the rabbit-hole questions: Dig into microgrids or governance for forty follow-ups without burning out a colleague.
Using a tool to pace your output isn’t fake. It’s considerate. It lets you think fast and still give people something they can actually hear.
From frustration to empathy
If this sounds like you — if you’ve been told to “calm down,” “slow down,” or “stop being so intense” — make peace with two things:
- The world won’t match your speed. Expecting a whole room to think at your pace is like expecting everyone to sprint a marathon. The frustration you feel often means you haven’t translated yet — not that they can’t understand.
- Stop apologizing for the engine. A racing, pattern-seeking mind isn’t arrogance. It’s how you’re wired. Don’t kill the engine. Build better gears.
When you separate how fast you think from how you speak, the loneliness eases.
You don’t have to choose between staying silent and flooding the room. Let your mind run — and give the people you lead the gift of a clear translation.
The Speed of Thought → The Asynchronous Dilemma Intensity hub Founder's Story All Stories
